Abstract

When the editors of Management Learning sought a reviewer for this book, I leapt at the opportunity. I identified instantly with the book for two reasons. First, as an undergraduate many years ago, I studied quite a lot of German philosophy: Hegel, Schlegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Nietzsche, Husserl. The course concluded with a nod to Heidegger. Too difficult, the professor said. Come back to this later. Now was that “later”. Second, after 15 years or so in business, I was invited to undertake just the sort of executive education that motivated Toby Thompson to write this book. It was a two-week residential course, run by professors at an eminent business school and designed as the cornerstone of a large corporation’s global leadership development. The exercise was illuminating. It led me to undertake an MBA a few years later, which led me a decade or so after that to teach at a business school and to pursue a PhD so I might teach the type of executive education I had experienced. To me, reviewing this book held out the promise of killing two philosophical bugbears with one philosopher’s stone. ...